I went to bed early Monday night, woke up shortly after midnight, got back to sleep fairly quickly.
Woke up again around 2:30, just drifting back to sleep, and I hear a reasonably faint ‘clank’.
Obviously not from inside my apartment or even, probably, from the parking lot.
A little bit later, another ‘clank’.
And now I knew what it was. I live a short distance from the huge snowbank on 15th Avenue by Foothills Boulevard, and I was hearing the tailgates on the snow trucks dropping back down after they dumped their load.
As I lay in bed, knowing I would have a hard time getting back to sleep because the noise was so unpredictable in terms of time, I started thinking about a few of the other little things in the past week that had annoyed me – although none of them kept me awake at night.
- I was in a local coffee shop, and there was a bit of a lineup at the counter. Nothing too drastic, just a wait of a couple of minutes to get to the counter. The person ahead of me got up to the counter and then, apparently for the first time, started looking at the menu they had posted on large boards.
I had been looking at the menu and at what they had to offer for snacks while I was waiting in line, so I was able to place my order fairly quickly when I got to the counter, and kept the line moving.
So why couldn’t the person ahead of me do the same thing?
- Still seeing a number of drivers going through red lights at various intersections, but saw a new variation on the theme this week.
I was in the through lane with a vehicle in the left-turn lane beside me. Their light turned red while he was still a full car length behind me, but he didn’t slow down. Cruised in the intersection, and then did a U-turn.
I have a feeling that may have been slightly illegal.
- I was in the parking lot at Spruceland Mall, and was looking for a place to park (which makes sense in a parking lot).
The vehicle ahead of me turned into one of the lanes, and had to put their brakes on. There was a young woman walking right down the middle of the driving lane, looking at her cellphone, totally oblivious to the fact there were actually moving vehicles in the parking lot.
Since I have to assume she herself had just left a vehicle after parking it, I can only assume she has short-term memory problems and couldn’t remember having driven into the parking lot just a few minutes earlier.